Leaders must lead by example to make cultural transformations stick
I have sat through innumerable sessions in my professional life based on improving corporate culture, improving morale, and improving trust and relations between employees. Some of these have given me extremely valuable insights and the best of them have made major differences in the way I interacted with people in the workplace.
But you know what? At the end of the day, the effect that the majority of these sessions had on companies as a whole was minimal. Why is that?
In my opinion, the single biggest factor is that although leadership may have given lip-service to the transformation du jour, they failed to actively participate in it – and most likely did not change their own behaviors to align with the new methods and norms being taught.
There have been exceptions, of course – I’m thinking of one particular change initiative where the big boss and some of his direct reports actively adopted new terminology and new behaviors. This was pretty terrific – you could feel the energy and optimism in the workplace, because people thought that this time, we had a change that would last.
It didn’t, though. Notice I said some of the directors adopted the change. Others made their public show of support, but then behind closed doors bashed the program, and certainly didn’t implement changes within their own organizations.
Eventually, most of the leaders gave up and went back to the old way of doing things. Maybe the boss didn’t want to face an active mutiny; maybe he was just wasn’t strong enough to force compliance; I can’t speak to why, although I have theories.
Pockets of pro-transformation advocates resisted until they were eventually worn away or the directors changed jobs – and their replacements had no idea that the changes had ever been attempted.
The fact of the matter is that corporate culture has massive entropy – it does not change easily. And a company’s core values are largely an artifact of the founders and original leadership. They’re not going to be super comfortable hiring in replacement leaders who criticize their thinking or behavior, right? So that original culture gets perpetuated through generations of leadership until it’s firmly ingrained in the company’s DNA.
Once again, I’m not saying change is impossible – but it’s hard, it takes sustained and active work, and most of all it takes a solid and lasting commitment on the part of leadership to model the change they want to see. People look to their leaders for guidance. If they see enthusiasm, they will be enthusiastic; if they see change initiatives being ignored, they will feel free to ignore them as well.